Why can arthritis patients predict the weather?

  Before the change of weather, the lesion will be painful. Weather changes, such as cooling, chilly, cold, and increasing wind speed, can be seen and perceived by the average person, and the physiological mechanisms in the body will make normal adjustments to such changes. For example, when it is about to rain, the air pressure generally decreases and the humidity increases. In healthy people, the fluid in the cells leaks out on its own, leading to an increase in urine production as an adaptation to the weather. For patients with arthritis, the presence of diseased tissues prevents them from draining fluid from their cells in a timely manner in response to weather changes, resulting in higher pressure in the cells of the diseased area than in the surrounding normal tissues, causing a feeling of swelling and pain in the diseased area. This is one of the reasons why arthritis patients can anticipate weather changes.  The movement of positively and negatively charged atmospheric molecules and other changes occur in the atmosphere when the weather changes. As the different charges attract and hit each other, a series of electromagnetic phenomena and electromagnetic waves are generated, which can make the potential difference between positive and negative charges inside and outside the cells of the human body. Normal people can always maintain a balance to this potential difference, while arthritis patients can release some inflammatory substances due to changes in local capillaries and tissues, making nerve endings compressed and producing soreness and pain. Although changes in temperature, air pressure, humidity and many other elements can cause increased joint pain, none of these changes come as quickly as electromagnetic waves. So, often the local weather is still sunny and the abnormal electromagnetic waves have already transmitted the information about the weather change, which is why arthritis patients often start to experience pain before the weather changes and is another important reason for their ability to anticipate weather changes.  The knee joint is the most affected Some studies have mentioned that when exploring the effects of weather changes on the pain sites of rheumatoid arthritis patients, it was found that the majority of patients have pain in the joints, with the knee joint being the most affected, due to some of the characteristics of the joint itself. Experiments have been done to measure the temperature of different tissues in the body at room temperature, and the temperature of the joints is the lowest. When the subject was exposed to cold for 20 minutes and then the temperature of the different tissues was measured, the temperature of the joints was found to drop the most. When the subjects returned to the pre-experimental temperature environment, the joint temperatures continued to drop, even lower than the lowest temperatures that occurred during the experiment, indicating that joint temperature recovery was also slow. The rheumatic disease patients have poorer thermoregulatory mechanisms than healthy people, so the joint area is most sensitive to weather changes. The knee joint is the main weight-bearing joint of the human body, and synovial fluid is the liquid lubricant between the joints, and its viscosity has a great influence on the sliding motion of the joint. The human knee joint contains about 0.5 ml of synovial fluid, and the viscosity of synovial fluid is directly related to the content of mucin. When the temperature drops, the mucin content in the synovial fluid increases, which increases the viscosity of the synovial fluid and affects the movement of the joint. In addition, high plasma protein levels can also affect the protein in synovial fluid. Cold stimulation during sudden cooling can increase adrenaline secretion, and adrenaline can increase the viscosity of blood, which can increase the viscosity of synovial fluid, thus increasing joint resistance and causing joint pain.  Healing in desert areas can provide relief Since arthritis is so closely related to weather changes, this has led to the idea of using weather conditions to target arthritis treatment. Experiments have shown that patients with arthritis can achieve satisfactory results when they go to desert areas where the climate is dry, the sun shines for long periods of time, the temperature difference between day and night is large, and the changes in air pressure and humidity are small. However, when the patients returned to their original environment, some of them had a recurrence of their old disease. On the one hand, this shows that the treatment of joint diseases by climate factors alone cannot cure every patient; on the other hand, it also shows that the artificial creation of a suitable microclimate (with normal air pressure and temperature and low humidity) can be useful in the treatment of arthritis.  In conclusion, the influence of meteorological factors on arthritis is very complex, and is the result of the combined effect of multiple factors that are interrelated and mutually constraining. An environment with less variation in air pressure and humidity may help improve joint pain in arthritis patients due to weather changes.